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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Editor’s Corner

January 28: Last Big Bipartisan Initiative Under Fire From the Right

In this era of gridlock in Congress, enforced by a policy of Republican obstructionism, there has been one bright flickering hope: for criminal justice reform, which has been promoting by a fragile but wide-ranging left-right coalition convinced that the mandatory minimum sentences and mass incarceration associated with the “war on drugs” and other law-and-order measures of past decades has been a failure with massive human and fiscal costs. But now that initiative is under fire from the Right, as I explained this week at New York:

The temptation of law-and-order politics is pulling more and more conservatives away from the carefully cultivated, Evangelical-blessed, libertarian-influenced, bipartisan criminal-justice-reform movement, which was moving toward fruition in Congress.
The immediate flash point is in the Senate, where a bill to allow for reconsideration of federal sentences imposed under the idiotic regime of mandatory minimum sentences had been considered a very good prospect for enactment in this legislatively barren election year. Two of its most prominent backers were hyperconservative senators John Cornyn of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, and it had overcome its supposedly most difficult obstacle when Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley approved it.
But now a backlash — I am using the term very deliberately — is building, led by freshman Republican senator and conservative superstar Tom Cotton of Arkansas, supported by backbenchers who pretty clearly want to show off their law-and-order credentials. Politico‘s Seung Min Kim reports Cotton’s efforts could convince Mitch McConnell to deep-six the legislation for this Congress:

Cotton, the hawkish upstart who’s already made waves on the Iran nuclear deal and government surveillance programs, is now leading a new rebellion against a bipartisan effort to overhaul the criminal justice system — hoping to torpedo one of the few pieces of major legislation that could pass Congress in President Barack Obama’s final year.
GOP tensions over a bill that would effectively loosen some mandatory minimum sentences spilled over during a party lunch last week, when Cotton (R-Ark.), the outspoken Senate freshman, lobbied his colleagues heavily against the legislation, according to people familiar with the closed-door conversation. The measure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall with bipartisan support….
Cotton isn’t alone. Other Senate Republicans, including Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and David Perdue of Georgia, also registered their strong opposition during the lunch, even as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) vigorously defended the bill, which he helped negotiate. Risch stressed this message, according to one Republican source: Shouldn’t the GOP be a party of law and order?
Risch declined to elaborate on his concerns over the bill, saying he was displeased that his private remarks made during a party lunch were made public. But the deepening Republican split over reforming key elements of the criminal justice system — an effort years in the making that has been powered by an influential right-left coalition — may imperil whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ultimately will take up the measure later in this election year.

It’s easy to laugh at Risch’s displeasure at being caught in mid-demagoguery, but he is unquestionably articulating views that are in the air. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, after all, likes to talk about an immigrant-driven “crime wave” that requires a new crackdown on the lowlifes and losers who are challenging police authorities in the cities. And his attitude seems to have softened the commitment to criminal-justice reform of his sometimes Mini-Me and now-deadly rival, Ted Cruz.
But what may most be animating this collapse of bipartisanship is not the 2016 presidential election, but the next one or the one after that: whenever it is that Tom Cotton makes his inevitable move toward the White House. Possessor of a mile-long pre-political résumé (two Harvard degrees, circuit court clerkship, military service in Afghanistan and Iraq, a stint with McKinsey & Company), and already distinguishing himself as the hawkiest of hawks, Cotton is the purveyor of a grim, Calvinist, old-school conservatism that still has a lot of support in the GOP. As a House member he talked about the prospect of a debt limit breach and an ensuing recession as though it might be a good, bracing tonic for a nation too accustomed to easy credit. He’s just the guy to slam the prison door shut on those who might have gotten a tardy but life-saving reprieve from hammer-headed sentences.

I’d hate to guess when this rock might be pushed back up the Hill again if Cotton rolls it down.


January 21: Palin Passes the Torch to Trump

The “surprise” endorsement of Donald Trump by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t surprise me at all, as I explained at New York the night the deal went down:

Notwithstanding the howls of pain and rage from supporters of Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin’s decision to endorse Donald Trump for president makes perfect sense when you think about what she has distinctively represented in the Republican Party….She represents almost perfectly the passion and resentment of grassroots cultural-issues activists. When John McCain vaulted her into national politics, she was known for two things other than her gender: She was a “walk the walk” role model for the anti-abortion movement, thanks to her small child Trig, and she had taken on the “crony capitalist” GOP Establishment in Alaska and won. Thus she was a fellow “maverick” with Christian-right street cred and a “game-changing” identity.
The remarkably widespread belief that Palin lost the 2008 presidential election for her party is even more far-fetched than the hope that she could win it. And so the many fans she made in that campaign developed — with a lot of help from Palin herself — a deep resentment of all of the Democrats, Republicans, and media elites who belittled her. In a very real sense, she was the authentic representative of those local right-to-life activists — disproportionately women — who had staffed countless GOP campaigns and gotten little in return (this was before the 2010 midterm elections began to produce serious anti-choice gains in the states) other than the thinly disguised contempt of Beltway Republicans. And after 2008 she generated a sort of perpetual motion machine in which her fans loved her precisely for the mockery she so reliably inspired.
Unfortunately for those fans, St. Joan of the Tundra was never quite up to the demands of a statewide — much less national — political career. So she opportunistically intervened in politics between books and television specials and widely broadcast family sagas, mostly through well-timed candidate endorsements. It’s striking, though not surprising, that Palin is now endorsing the nemesis of one of her most successful “Mama Grizzly” protégées, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, on the turf of another, Iowa’s Joni Ernst.
But in many respects, the Trump campaign is the presidential campaign Palin herself might have aspired to run if she had the money and energy to do so. Her famous disregard for wonky facts and historical context is but a shadow of Trump’s. His facility with the big and effective lie can’t quite match Palin’s, who after all convinced many millions of people in a Facebook post that the Affordable Care Act authorized “death panels.” And both of them, of course, exemplify the demagogue’s zest for flouting standards of respectable discourse and playing the table-turning triumphant victim/conqueror of privileged elites.
Conservatism for both Trump and Palin simply supplies the raw material of politics and a preassembled group of aggrieved white people ready to follow anyone purporting to protect hard-earned threatened privileges, whether it’s Social Security and Medicare benefits or religious hegemony. So it’s natural Palin would gravitate to Trump rather than Cruz, who’s a professional ideologue but a mere amateur demagogue. The endorser and the endorsee were meant for each other.

And it’s a token of Palin’s esteem for The Donald that she didn’t expect him (or so it seems) to offer her the same position on the ticket she had in 2008. She’ll be happy as his Secretary of Energy, where she can continue her feud with oil companies even as she encourages them to “Drill, Baby, Drill.”


January 20: A Panicking Republican Establishment Begins To Nourish Fantasies

Each day that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz fail to self-destruct as presidential candidates is a bad day for the Republican Establishment. The panic that is incipient in their ranks was expressed in a very graphic way earlier this week by New York Tiimes columnist David Brooks, who is calling for a “conspiracy” to thwart the deadly duo. I wrote about Brooks’ fears and fantasies at New York:

It’s odd enough to see Brooks identify himself as a Republican, panicked or otherwise. He typically likes to position himself far, far above the ignorant partisan armies clashing by night, a condor wheeling and soaring in broad, high-minded arcs before eventually landing on ground that happens to coincide with the short-term positions of the GOP. But it seems the present emergency is now too dire for these sort of dialectics.

Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now riding high in some meaningless head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, but the odds are the nomination of either would lead to a party-decimating general election.

So what is to be done?

What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February. In politics, if A (Trump) and B (Cruz) savage each other then the benefits often go to Candidate C. But there has to be a C, not a C, D, E, F and G.

I suppose this is an advance endorsement of the idea that whichever Establishment candidate wins that “lane” in New Hampshire — whose primary is right on the brink of “mid-February” — should have it all to himself thereafter. But who will insist on Jeb’s super-pac disgorging its money, or Kasich not holding on until Ohio, or Rubio and Bush not holding on until Florida, or Christie throwing in the towel while his ego still rages unappeased? Oh, that’s right: a “grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism,” whatever that might be. Seems it will have to be something different from the usual Republican formula:

This new movement must come to grips with two realities. First, the electorate has changed. Less-educated voters are in the middle of a tidal wave of trauma. Labor force participation is dropping, wages are sliding, suicide rates are rising, heroin addiction is rising, faith in American institutions is dissolving.
Second, the Republican Party is not as antigovernment as its elites think it is. Its members no longer fit into the same old ideological categories. Trump grabbed his lead with an ideological grab bag of gestures, some of them quite on the left. He is more Huey Long than Calvin Coolidge.

So the “Republican conspiracy” needs to preempt that appeal:

What’s needed is a coalition that combines Huey Long, Charles Colson and Theodore Roosevelt: working-class populism, religious compassion and institutional reform.

Does any of that sound like Jeb! Bush to you? Or Marco Rubio? Or Chris Christie? Or John Kasich? Will this new “grassroots movement” that’s supposed to arise in a matter of weeks recognize its hero, and will that happen to coincide with the wishes of a plurality of New Hampshire primary voters? Is there any remote chance the tepid “Reformicon” agenda Brooks alludes to in casting about for something “governing conservatives” can talk about will light fires in the electorate?
Hell if David Brooks knows. But he’s laid down his marker and will now presumably flee back to higher ground.


January 15: Republicans in the Fever Swamps

I still have a bad taste in my memory from watching last night’s FBN Republican candidates’ debate from South Carolina. It was more prominent last night when I wrote about the debate at New York:

The Fox Business Network moderators led the Republican presidential candidates exactly where they wanted to go in Thursday night’s long debate by framing it as a response to the president’s relatively upbeat assessment of America in the State of the Union address. They begged to differ, and differed from each other (with one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment) mainly in their assessment of their qualifications to deal with a country besieged by immigrant-terrorists, refugee-terrorists, and rampant criminals; teetering on the edge of economic collapse; humiliated hourly by mocking, strutting enemies; and led by virtual traitors.
Ted Cruz, whose candidacy was already staked to the premise that conservatives can win the presidency without a single concession to anyone else, managed to ratchet up the high-pitched chattering whine of ideological extremism in his rhetoric via a closing statement that focused on Benghazi!, a pseudo-scandal that everyone other than the Faithful have written off for many months. Marco Rubio, his voice raised to a new stridency, is now routinely joining Ben Carson in blowing a Bircher dog whistle about Barack Obama aiming at a “fundamental change” in the nature of the country. He’s also now rationalizing his crabwise changes on immigration policy as a response to ISIS. Chris Christie, himself the target of attacks for being too much like Obama, suggested that massively expanded NSA surveillance could solve the problem of identifying “radical Islamists,” and sounded so much like a 1960s law-and-order candidate that you half expected him to attack the Earl Warren Court for taking the handcuffs off the criminals and putting them on the police. Even Jeb Bush, the only candidate to offer a real objection to Trump’s Islamophobia, seemed to suggest his rivals were mere paper tigers in assaulting the godless liberals.
A lot of the other exchanges — over Cruz’s qualifications to be president, and over his classic red-state demagoguery about “New York values;” and the Rubio-Cruz fracas over tax policy that seemed to revolve around the suspicion that a VAT tax was “European” — canceled themselves out or just reinforced the impression that these men had exotic preoccupations.
John Kasich shined a light on the dark landscape of America depicted by the debaters simply by coming across as a boring, standard-brand conservative. His suggestion that protesters against police excesses might have a point stood out like a Bernie Sanders protester (though Kasich’s mockery of Sanders’s electability might draw attention to the fact that no pollster has taken Kasich seriously enough to test him against Bernie!). We’ll see if this approach gives him an angle on a crucial slice of moderate voters in New Hampshire, or simply confirms him as the Jon Huntsman of this cycle.
In the end, the domination of the endless debate time by everything other than the basic economic issues you might expect from a business network showed how far into the fever swamps the GOP contest has strayed. When Donald Trump responded to the attack from host-state Governor Nikki Haley on “the angriest voices” by saying “I will gladly welcome the mantle of anger,” he did not stand out at all.

My New York colleague Jonathan Chait agreed:

Months ago, during the Summer of Trump, Republicans looked at the appearance of this gross, comic, orange interloper among them with a mix of shock and disdain. Fox News tried to discredit him as a serious candidate; nobody else onstage knew quite what to do with him. Since then, Trump has created facts on the ground, making himself an indispensable element of the party. He now seems completely normal.

And that is not a good sign for the GOP.


January 14: Republicans Returning to 1964?

For a good while, Democrats have wondered how far back the rightward trend in the GOP would take Republicans. There are signs, as I discussed earlier this week at New York, that they are arriving at 1964 in their wayback machine:

For Republicans with a sense of history, chills might have gone down their spines at this passage from a Jonathan Martin piece in the New York Times about big donors warming to Ted Cruz:

What is more striking, and will cause deep consternation among Republican strategists, is that … donors are beginning to embrace Mr. Cruz’s argument that he can win a general election by motivating core conservatives to come to the polls rather than by appealing to swing voters.
Andrew Puzder, chief executive of the conglomerate that owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., supported both of Mr. Romney’s campaigns and has contributed to a number of “super PACs” and candidates this year, including Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. But after spending a couple of hours eating brisket with Mr. Cruz on Sunday at his campaign headquarters, Mr. Puzder said he was “very seriously considering” getting behind him, in part because of his appeal to the conservative base.
“I’ve become a one-issue voter,” Mr. Puzder said. “My one issue is whether somebody is going to win. My big question is: What is your path to a general election victory?”
Unhappily recalling that Mr. Romney won among self-described independents but still was soundly defeated by President Obama, Mr. Puzder said, “Part of the reason was that the base didn’t turn out to vote, and Senator Cruz understands that needs to happen.”

This is, of course, an argument a certain kind of conservative has been making for decades, back to and beyond Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign based on the idea of offering (to use the title of the pro-Goldwater campaign book written by a young right-wing activist named Phyllis Schlafly) “a choice, not an echo,” in repudiation of the Republican Establishment’s perpetual idea of “moving to the center” to win swing voters.
The cataclysmic defeat incurred by Goldwater drove this conviction underground for a while, and even the Goldwater veteran Ronald Reagan ran a conventional swing-voter-oriented “referendum on the incumbent” campaign in 1980. This hasn’t kept his hagiographers from remembering it differently, and so there has been a regular debate within the GOP over base versus swing-voter strategies ever since. Sometimes campaigns blurred the strategies, as in 2004, when George W. Bush’s reelection effort focused to a considerable extent on base mobilization, but only after four years of careful and systematic swing-voter pandering via Karl Rove’s famous initiatives targeted to married women (No Child Left Behind), seniors (Rx Drug Benefit), and Latinos (comprehensive immigration reform) — initiatives conservatives are still deploring to this day….
Cruz is the first viable candidate in a while who has gone wall-to-wall with a path to the nomination and an electability argument founded entirely on the theory that, when united and energized, conservatives can win the presidency on their own. Sometimes he strains his credibility even with true believers by talking of many tens of millions of conservative Evangelicals waiting to be called to arms as Christian soldiers by someone like his own self. Nonetheless, the quite factual decline in the number of swing voters and various theories of “missing white voters” have made the old-time religion of ideological mobilization tantalizing if not entirely convincing. Perhaps today’s conservatives think that a reincarnation of Barry Goldwater could win today and that the vast rollback of New Deal and early Great Society programs Goldwater demanded is still possible.
In any event, big donors and Republican Establishment opinion-leaders used to exist in order to refute such dangerous talk. If they are beginning to buy it instead, this could be a fascinating and dangerous year for the GOP even if Donald Trump is vanquished and then domesticated.

If Cruz’s campaign adopts the slogan: “In your heart, you know he’s right,” then we’ll know the half-century regression is complete.


January 8: The “Libertarian Moment” Turning Into a Brief Flash in the Pan

2012 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and more recently CEO of Cannabis Sativa, a marijuana products and licensing company, announced this week that he would again pursue the radically anti-government party’s ballot line. At New York I discussed the significance of the vaccum Johnson is filling:

Johnson’s announcement probably marks the sad realization of many libertarians that the mainstream political breakthrough, or “moment” (as Robert Draper put it in a much discussed New York Times Magazine feature in August 2014), they had hoped for isn’t happening. That’s because the presidential campaign of the supposed vehicle for that breakthrough, Senator Rand Paul, has made even Jeb Bush’s effort look effervescent.
It’s instructive to compare Senator Paul’s standing right now to that of his father — supposedly marginalized by his eccentric congressional record, unsavory associations, and peculiar obsessions — at this point in 2012. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Rand Paul is currently running seventh nationally with 3 percent. Twenty-six days from the first votes in 2012, Ron Paul was running fourth nationally with just under 10 percent. In Iowa, Rand Paul is tied for seventh place with 2.6 percent. Ron Paul was tied for second place with 17.4 percent at this point in 2012. And in New Hampshire, supposedly a very libertarian friendly jurisdiction, Rand Paul is in ninth place with 3.8 percent. In 2012 at this juncture, Ron Paul was in third place with 14.5 percent.
The whole premise of the Draper piece was that Rand Paul had taken the old man’s creed and modified it enough to make it acceptable to mainstream Republican audiences, while potentially adding some independent and even Democratic voters to an old white GOP base badly in need of new recruits. Instead, he seems to have lost some of the old magic of the Revolution, and more than a few voters.

Some Libertarians, who are notoriously uncomfortable with compromise, are probably happy not to have to deal with the temptation of a Republican candidate who has come from but appears to have left behind the True Creed. There’s always John Galt to cite as an ideal.


January 6:Trump Not What Reformicons Bargained For

Ever since it became obvious that Donald Trump’s most compelling appeal was to non-college educated Republican-leaners, it’s been difficult for the so-called Reform Conservatives, a.k.a. Reformicons, who had been arguing for a GOP focus on this category of voters. Needless to say Trump isn’t what these conservative intellectuals had in mind, as I discussed earlier this week at New York:

It’s been just over a decade since two young conservative intellectuals penned a challenge to Republican economic-policy orthodoxy at the Weekly Standard after noting the GOP’s dependence on white working-class voters:

This is the Republican party of today — an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now “the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.”
Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn’t just out of touch with the country as a whole, it’s out of touch with its own base.

Ross Douthat (now a New York Times columnist) and Reihan Salam (now at National Review) went on to lay out a policy agenda that they thought might finally begin to align the GOP with the economic interests of its middle-class, non-entrepreneurial supporters, focused on more generous child tax credits and other pro-parenting initiatives; “market-based” health-care reform; wage subsidies (as opposed to minimum-wage mandates); and a retreat from the Bush administration’s immigration policies.
Douthat and Salam expanded their essay into the 2008 book Grand New Party, and three years later, Mr. Sam’s Club Republican himself, Tim Pawlenty, launched an unsuccessful presidential campaign that mainly just looked like a bland effort to appeal to GOP voters across factional lines. But joined by others who began calling themselves “reform conservatives” or Reformicons (Ryan Cooper wrote a useful taxonomy of them early in 2013 for the Washington Monthly), those calling for a more middle-class-oriented domestic policy stance by the GOP (the Reformicons mostly ignored foreign policy) grew into a loose, if elite, faction that sought influence in various parts of the GOP. In early 2014, Reformicons put together something of a rough policy playbook under the sponsorship of then-high-flying House GOP leader Eric Cantor. And as the 2016 presidential contest took shape, Reformicons were found in prominent positions in the campaigns of Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Jeb Bush. Rubio looked to be the best vehicle for Reformicon ideas, given his youth, his warm embrace of “family-friendly” tax policies, and a Hispanic identity that made his sudden opposition to comprehensive immigration reform (an about-face that most, if not all, Reformicons supported) go down easier. Sure, Rubio’s tax plan gave trillions to corporations and wealthy individuals and relative peanuts to working-class families (a good reflection of the balance of power in the GOP), but it won plaudits for heretical courage nonetheless.
And then, like a very bad joke (You call that Sam’s Club Republicanism? Here’s Sam’s Club Republicanism!), along came a presidential candidate who represented what many in the white working class really wanted: not just a GOP Establishment figure who paid their economic interests lip service, but someone who violently opposed liberalized immigration policies along with the pro-trade, “entitlement reform” orthodoxy of wealthy GOP elites, and articulated a fear of cultural change and national decline that most well-off Republicans, continuing to prosper during the current economic “recovery,” could not begin to fathom. Worse yet, it seems Republicans’ best idea for “taking Trump down” was to show he is not a “true conservative” on economic issues. As Reformicons could have told them, neither are most white working-class Republican voters….
Could Republicans have headed off the calamity Trump may represent for them by listening to the Reformicons and paying greater tribute to the white working class? Maybe. But the other possibility is that we are seeing a long-suppressed explosion of conflict between Republicans motivated by cultural discontent and hostility to Democratic constituencies and those who actually buy into economic policies designed to propitiate wealthy “job creators.”

If that’s so, Trump is just the beginning of the GOP’s problems.


December 31: No Cracks So Far in the Obama Coalition

Of all the variables affecting the 2016 presidential contest, one of the more important is the extent to which the “Obama Coalition” of young and minority voters will stay in the Donkey column in requisite numbers. There’s some new evidence it will that I discussed at New York this week:

One clue (h/t Paul Waldman at the Washington Post) is provided by a new Reuters analysis of recent polling on party identification. Here are the most important numbers:

– Among Hispanics who are likely presidential voters, the percentage affiliated with the Republican Party has slipped nearly five points, from 30.6 percent in 2012 to 26 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, Hispanic Democrats grew by six percentage points to 59.6 percent.
– Among whites under 40, the shift is even more dramatic. In 2012, they were more likely to identify with the Republican Party by about 5 percentage points. In 2015, the advantage flipped: Young whites are now more likely to identify with the Democratic Party by about 8 percentage points.
– Meanwhile, black likely voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic, at about 80 percent.
Overall, the study shows, the Democratic margin in party ID has grown from 6 percent in 2012 to 9 percent this year.

These numbers should obviously not be taken at face value. For one thing, self-identification is not an infallible indication of voting behavior. For another, Republicans have recently been winning self-identified independents in competitive races. And for still another, there are obviously people who don’t vote for, or actually vote against, “their” party’s presidential nominee, though such cross-party voters have been declining in numbers rapidly of late.
The central question is whether the stability of the Obama coalition is attributable to what Democrats are doing to keep them happy or what Republicans are doing to repulse them, for all the GOP’s protestations of inclusiveness. If the latter is the case, Republicans might want to nominate a candidate (e.g., the relatively young Hispanic candidate Marco Rubio) with a fighting chance of mitigating the damage. If the former is the case, it would seem the theory that Obama and only Obama can keep “his” coalition together might be wrong, and Republicans have a bigger problem than the precise identity of their nominee.
Many Republicans would protest that even if Reuters’s numbers are accurate, they measure preferences, not enthusiasm, which will tilt results in their direction. I would observe that the numbers are based on Reuters/Ipsos polls of likely voters, so to some extent “enthusiasm” is baked right into them. Now, if Ted Cruz’s claim that 54 million conservative Evangelicals “sat out” 2012 and are waiting for someone just like him to vote for is somehow true, then such hordes of new voters would obviously outweigh any current voter ID advantage Democrats might have. On the other hand, if the Cruz theory is true, we are far, far beyond the realm of empirical evidence and rational argument, and perhaps the donkey party can mobilize elves and wood-sprites to offset the aroused Evangelicals.

Yeah, for those who are interested in data rather than spin, there’s no real indication so far that the Obama Coalition will crack next November.


December 30: Tip For Democrats: Don’t Condescendingly Dismiss White Working Class Voters’ Non-Economic Anxieties

Bernie Sanders has been spending some time lately arguing that he is the rare Democrat who can appeal to Donald Trump’s white working class following. It’s a fine idea. But his approach to them brings back some bad memories of past campaigns, as I discussed earlier this week at New York:

Remember “Bittergate,” one of the big but ultimately not decisive moments of the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process? It’s pretty clear Bernie Sanders doesn’t, because he’s repeating Barack Obama’s much-repented mistake of condescendingly speaking of white working-class voters’ concerns on noneconomic issues as representing displaced anxiety about lost jobs and low wages.
On Face the Nation yesterday, Sanders had this to say about Donald Trump’s appeal to downscale white voters:

“Many of Trump’s supporters are working-class people and they’re angry, and they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, they’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college so they can’t retire with dignity,” Sanders said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears which are legitimate and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims, and in my view that is not the way we’re going to address the major problems facing our country,” he said.

Compare that to Obama’s famous remark about the same kind of voters in 2008:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Other than the fact that Obama’s comments were made in a private Bay Area fund-raiser and subsequently leaked, while Sanders made his on national television, they differ mainly in that the former slighted the hot-button subjects of religion and guns while the latter limited his condescension to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim appeals. But in both cases you get a strong whiff of the ancient lefty habit of claiming the noneconomic concerns of economically stressed people represent a “false consciousness” actively promoted by the economic ruling class.
What should Sanders (and other progressives) be saying to less offensively make their case for working-class economic populism? For one thing, it would be helpful not to conflate quasi-economic issues with totally noneconomic issues, as Sanders does with immigration and terrorism. You can tell people that corporate power rather than “illegal immigration” is the reason wages have been stagnating without insulting them. Telling them they should be worried more about money than (in their view) their families’ and their country’s security against terrorism is another matter altogether, especially when in both cases you are more than slightly hinting they are bigots for listening to Donald Trump. Having a progressive answer to fears about terrorism — even if it’s to say such fears are exaggerated — is invariably better than changing the subject or implying that if you care about terrorism you are a conservative.
Barack Obama apologized immediately and often for “Bittergate,” and did not again make the mistake of appearing to tell downscale voters their professed concerns and beliefs show what dopes they are. But Democrats seem to need a reminder now and then, just as Republicans seem to need a reminder that their contempt for the poor and minorities is as easy to spot as Mitt Romney at a civil-rights rally.


December 24: 2016 Could Be a Turning Point

Political analyses of the future prospects of the two major parties vary according to a lot of variables. But to over-simplify, some observers stress long-range trends while others focus on short-term events that could significantly bend future trends. A good example of the former has just been published by Peter Beinart at The Atlantic, and I discussed my misgivings about it at New York today:

Excessive faith in the inevitability of progress is one of the hazards of being a “progressive”…. Peter Beinart has written an election-year table-setter that political people left of center will be forwarding to one another to ward off fears of a Ted Cruz presidency or worse. Its title is “Why America Is Moving Left.” I wish I were sure he is right.
Beinart’s jumping-0ff point is his belief that though conditions might seem right for an old-fashioned law-and-order backlash to phenomena like #blacklivesmatter, liberalizing forces in both parties will prevent that from happening. Again, I’d feel better about that prediction if it rang true a few years from now.
One big factor preventing a shift to the right, says Beinart, is that the “centrist” forces in the Democratic Party, which in the ’80s and ’90s pushed for accommodation of conservative ideology, are largely gone. He speaks as the former editor of one such institution, The New Republic. I feel qualified to respond not only as a fairly substantial contributor to TNR for a while, but also as a former staffer at two other “centrist” institutions he mentions, the Democratic Leadership Council and the Washington Monthly. In Beinart’s view, the center-left discredited itself by enabling George W. Bush’s domestic and international agenda. While his account is oversimplified — the DLC, for example, attacked the Bush tax cuts pretty aggressively, though some of its congressional allies voted for them anyway — I’d say there’s some truth to it. But it’s also true that Democrats absorbed enough “centrist” common sense in the 1990s to make it possible to exploit the implosion of conservatism under Bush. And some of the ideas Beinart writes about as “centrist,” such as the neoliberal advocacy of means-testing big social programs (associated with WaMo), were not accommodations of conservatism but rather efforts to make more funds and political energy available for the truly needy. Unlike the kind of split-the-differences “centrism” that really has expired, there could be a future for means-testing, as suggested by Hillary Clinton’s habit of looking in that direction for new social initiatives like pre-K and paid family leave….
All quibbling aside, Beinart is obviously right that the Democratic Party is more consistently liberal than it has ever been. But the idea that it’s all part of a leftward trend that is invincible even within the Republican Party is much more problematic.
Yes, ultimately, the more progressive views of millennials mean that a GOP that has been trending pretty steadily rightward for four decades will have to adjust to reality, at least on cultural issues. And yes, the fact that many of the conservative movement’s most fervent causes — such as fighting universal health coverage or same-sex marriage or any sort of gun regulation — are not exactly sweeping the country means they will not have a cakewalk in presidential contests where the electorate is not skewed in their favor.
But that’s an influence, not a trend. Beinart believes any GOP general election candidate this next year will smell the coffee and appeal to millennials and minority voters by repudiating the hard-core conservatism that’s characterized the nominating process for so long. You sure would not guess that from the electability theories of candidates and analysts alike, who believe a supercharged turnout by the same old conservative coalition could prevail if reinforced by natural fatigue with a two-term president, a sluggish economy, and terrorist fears. Beinart also believes a Republican president would turn the page to the left. Yet the most profound reality the country faces is that a GOP president with a GOP Congress could, via the budget reconciliation process, repeal almost all of Obama’s accomplishments. The nascent and in many respects faint progressive impulses of the Reformicons are to a considerable extent just too little and too early.
Yes, in the long run there are forces that will build a wind to the back of progressives. But today’s conservative-movement-dominated GOP is too radical and too close to total power for anyone to take that to the bank. Some very reactionary days could be just ahead.

It really is going to depend on what happens next year.